The next president of Chile, who will govern the South American country between 2026 and 2030, will be defined between the candidate of the left, the communist, and the far-right, leader of the Republican Party. , after the first round of elections. With 62% counted, Jara, the standard-bearer of the , has reached 26.63%, below what the surveys projected. Second place has been obtained by Kast, with 24.25% of the votes, a minimum distance and which leaves him as a favorite to achieve victory, to the extent that the conservative forces have achieved majority support. Thirdly, the surprise of the day: the right-wing populist, Franco Parisi, has reached 19.05% in his third attempt to reach La Moneda, displacing both , which has obtained 13.94% of the support, placing fourth, and the greatly defeated: , which has placed fifth (13.204%), giving a great failure to the Chile Vamos coalition.
“I congratulate Jeannette Jara and José Antonio Kast for their passage to the second round,” said President Boric from La Moneda, supported by his Minister of the Interior, Álvaro Elizalde, and his spokesperson, Camila Vallejo.
The results, in which the union of the right-wing forces have a notable majority, coincide with the scenario that the polls repeatedly showed: on December 14, the nearly 15.7 million voters obligatorily summoned to the polls will have to choose Boric’s successor between two extremes of politics. Although Jara won first place, however, the votes of Kast, Kaiser and Matthei add up to 51%, which makes Kast strong for the second round. If we add the support of Parisi, a populist, opponent of Boric, we reach 70%, although Parisi’s vote is difficult to decipher, because there is no evidence that it is transferable to the right.
The difference between Jara and Kast, around two points, was not what the left expected. The polls consecutively showed that the 51-year-old public administrator would obtain the greatest support this Sunday the 16th, but by a difference between five and nine points with Kast. His main challenge was not to win this first round – after a primary – but to achieve a majority that would allow him to win the second round or runoff, on December 14. According to the polls, which have generally made correct projections, Jara would lose to Kast, a 59-year-old lawyer. Especially with such a minimal difference over the Republican. From this Sunday night, therefore, he will have to send strong signals to the moderate electorate, which is what he did tonight when evaluating the proposals of other candidates, such as those of Parisi or Matthei. A first gesture that is expected is that Jara, where she has been enrolled since she was 14 years old, which generates great resistance. In addition, a change is expected in his team and the incorporation of figures that will allow him to deliver certainties to the political center.
Kast, as it seemed, surpassed both Parisi, Matthei and Kaiser. It is the third time that the far-right candidate has run for the Presidency. In the previous elections, , but in the runoff he lost to Boric, the current president. , like abortion, for Chile with priorities in security, economic growth, the weakening of the State – it seeks to cut 6,000 million dollars in 18 months – and irregular migration. Tonight he will have the support of Kaiser, with whom they already have a joint electoral pact for Congress, and Matthei, who went to visit Kast at his command. The Republican will be joined by a large part of the world of the traditional right, grouped in the Chile Vamos coalition. The pragmatic right-wingers will join forces to prevent Jara from coming to power on March 11, when Boric leaves the Government at the age of 40.
The signals that the two candidates who go to the second round deliver in the next few hours are key to gathering support. Jara has even fallen below the historical support that the Boric Government has had, 30% loyal, but insufficient to be a majority. In fact, in this first campaign she has had to distance herself from the president and his Administration, although she herself was Minister of Labor until a few months ago. Jara’s mission is titanic, because the winds in Chile today are blowing in favor of the radical right and, as has usually happened for 20 years, the presidential election is always won by the opposition bloc.
Chile has once again held, as has happened since the recovery of democracy, an electoral event with complete normality. In addition to electing Boric’s successor (155 congressmen) and practically half of the Senate (23 of the 50 senators from seven regions, among which the capital constituency is not). It is the first time since the return of democracy in 1990 that citizens elect a President of the Republic with mandatory voting and, at the same time, with automatic registration in the census.
Chilean society has been pendulous in its electoral preferences. , with unusual waves of violence that left the Government of the moderate right-wing president Sebastián Piñera on the ropes, the voters approved a constitutional path to replace the Constitution of Augusto Pinochet of 1980, which, however, bears the signature of the socialist president Ricardo Lagos for the reforms that were made to it in 2005. Then, they elected a drafting body dominated by the extreme left and, when the Government of President Boric was barely six months old, they rejected by a 62% against 38% the text that the ruling party supported. It was a resounding failure that forced the Government to adapt to the new circumstances and moderate the high expectations with which it took office in March 2022. Afterwards, a second process was opened to prepare a new Constitution, where drafters, especially from the ultra-right of the Republican Party, triumphed, but in 2023 Chileans again rejected the proposal by 55% to 42%.
This is what is known as the chilean pendulum. They seem like contradictory decisions, but they are not: society remains angry and, above all, with great disaffection with political institutions. Therefore, for two decades they have been punishing the incumbents and favoring the opposition, as if trying to believe in change, which never truly comes. Governments, in turn, with an atomized Congress, have serious problems in achieving majorities and carrying out legislative agendas. Chileans, who do not trust governments, parties or Parliament, participate disillusioned in elections that, for the first time, have mandatory voting. Polls show that Chileans were more worried than hopeful about these elections and that more than half agree with the phrase “It doesn’t matter who governs, I still have to go to work.”
This is the Chile that the next president will receive in four more months, when he takes office on March 11. With an unfaithful electorate, which does not maintain support for long, and which is above all scared by the arrival of transnational organized crime. It is part of the social landscape that explains why the air pushes extreme discourses like Kast’s and, in turn, the difficulties of the left.
